Why That Color? Prison Artists' Color Palette
In choosing 25 of Prison art's most beautiful women, works in color had been chosen more frequently, here’s why.
Despite the cover image to "25 of Prison Art's Most Beautiful Women," being one of the black and white images selected, the vast majority chosen were color images. 21st century photographers have long been faced with publishing or printing their images in black and white or color. Even the Instagram account holder must make similar filtering decisions.
According to the publication Scientific American, psychologists have found that colors enhance an individual's visual memory. From a series of experiments, researchers learned that subjects were more likely to recall the color version of an image than the same scene in black and white.
In a 2020 blog post, California, Bay Area, Black and White Fine Art photographer Marty Knapp shared his readers' response when asked to choose their preferred version of the same cloudy landscape photograph, one in color, the other in black and white, color took the majority. One respondent wrote, "I LOVE the color; it’s so clearly Spring and completely JOYFUL, where the monochrome just doesn’t convey that energy."
Despite the color preference, Internet search engines normally return black and white drawings in their Search results for Prison art. This might be best explained by Phillis Kornfeld in her 1997, Princeton University Press published book Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America. Kornfeld, with over 30-years of teaching art inside of prisons, had found works done in ink pen to be traditional Prison artwork.
The why and how come, is probably found in the coined term "Carceral Aesthetics." A term to mean, "The production of art under the conditions of unfreedom; it involves the creative use of penal space, time, and matter. … Immobility, invisibility, stigmatization, lack of access, and premature death govern the lives of the imprisoned and their expressive capacities. Such deprivation becomes raw material and subject matter for prison art, wrote Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood in her Harvard University Press published book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
The book took over ten years to write, as a result of some prison artists being transferred to solitary confinement. Which can also explain the lack of color in the works by the incarcerated. Just as primitive humans used pigments from their environment in painting, so do the prisoner artists under the resource deprivation of their "Carceral Aesthetics."
County jails, which serve as pretrial detention for those unable to make bail, is not going to be the best paradigm to be handing out paint and paint brushes. It is an environment in which the detainee will be provided pen & paper, or pencil & paper. It is from these monochromatic writing tools that the artist familiar with drawing will create.
Similar to a prisoner in solitary confinement, they will be given the bare minimum. It is not a place for paint by the numbers, nor art therapy, but for punishment. This means just a single pencil or pen to write home with.
Some of the released prisoner artists who are now seeing a degree of notoriety in the Art world are from the Federal prison system. Ask any State prisoner, and he or she will tell you the Feds is a much easier place to do time than State prison; there are some exceptions.
So, why that color? For the prison artist, it all depends on where they’re serving time.
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